The Candidate Experience – How to Audit your Application Form Process

Your job advertisement is live, and applications are arriving, but what happens when the response rate isn’t as good as you hoped?

Perhaps your role wasn’t positioned correctly and on the right boards by the recruitment agency, or maybe the advert wasn’t appealing enough. As well as looking at these potential issues that could have occurred, it’s important to consider how easy the application process is for your candidates.

The application form offers a good starting point to help you identify the essentials of what you are looking for within a candidate. However, when creating it, did you think about how straight forward it is to complete?

Lengthy application forms can put job seekers off, resulting in individuals not bothering to complete them at all which means you could be missing out on good candidates. Before launching your ad, remember the importance of auditing your application looking at it from the candidate’s point of view.

1. What do you really need to know

The application form is your chance to acquire the information you need from candidates. Consider what you are asking, by identifying what it is that you need to know. Remember not to bombard your potential candidates with questions, as you may put them off.

2. Screen, but don’t get carried away

It can be useful to have initial filtering on the first application form, in order to screen candidates early on. Again, keep it straight forward without asking too many questions, as you can always ask a second round of questions if needs be.

3. Communicate clearly and confirm

What is recommended by recruitment agencies is that the application process is simple and clear to complete, however what agencies won’t always offer is an automated response message.

Such confirmation (usually in the form of an email) is a reassurance to the candidate that their application has been successfully received, and should be in addition to the onscreen confirmation message.

4. Time is of the essence

The likelihood is that you have another hundred things to do whilst creating the application form, but remember that so do candidates.

Try timing how long the application process takes, and do it with a couple of people who haven’t seen it before for a test run.

We recommend a process that takes no longer than 5 minutes, and if possible, slightly less than this.

5. Don’t forget your mobile audience

If you haven’t got a mobile optimised recruitment process, why not? There could be a huge number of candidates that you are missing out on by having an application form that functions on a mobile device.

Mobile optimised recruitment gives a great competitive advantage to your business, and attracts busy jobseekers on the go.

Webrecruit Ireland has worked with thousands of clients to ensure that their candidate application forms are streamlined and efficient for a better candidate experience.

To discover more about Webrecruit Ireland and our recruitment solutions, request a brochure today.